Thom Senzee, author of this article, is a West Coast-based freelance journalist, and a regular contributor to San Diego LGBT Weekly.
If you want to hold a big party in a big public park, say a festival celebrating gender and sexual diversity like the one held for more than 40 years in San Diego’s historic Balboa Park, it takes a lot of money, advanced planning and permits.
In the case of that last asset, whoever holds the permits holds the keys to the city, or the park. That may be especially if you’re talking about the 2017 San Diego LGBT pride festival; lower-case “p” intended to indicate “pride” as a concept rather than a particular organization because, lately, competing groups in our fair city have been vying for the “Pride” trademark, as it were.
According to an official at the City of San Diego Office of Special Events, neither the somewhat less-than-recently embattled legacy organization, San Diego LGBT Pride, which has produced the festival for more than four decades, nor the nascent San Diego Community Pride group, has yet applied for a special event permit to hold Pride 2017.
However, there is a distinction worth noting between a special event permit and a park-space reservation permit, which the city’s Office of Special Events requires groups or individuals to first secure before even applying for a special events permit if the event is to be held at a city park.
Now it appears the City Attorney’s office is looking to recommend which group will get the permit to reserve space at Balboa Park the third weekend in July, 2017, the traditional period for San Diego’s pride festival.
Contrary to rumblings in some corners of San Diego’s historically LGBT Hillcrest community and assertions among some factions loyal to the board of directors of the legacy Pride group, that group’s former executive director, Stephen Whitburn did not “march right over” to City Hall to vexatiously pull his own permit to hold his own competing pride festival the day the board terminated his employment in mid-August.
In fact, he says, it wasn’t until Oct. 3 that he applied to reserve space at Balboa Park in the name of the new group, San Diego Community Pride, and only after some of the nearly 100 community members who had attended a now infamously contentious public board meeting of San Diego LGBT Pride urged him to lead the formation of a new pride organization.
According to Whitburn, who organized the last few incarnations of San Diego’s annual Pride parade and festival – this year’s being the most financially successful and arguably one of its most highly praised events in history (a good thing for him, given the relative debacle that was the previous year’s confab) – late September is generally the prescribed time to apply for permits for the next year’s events.
“It turned out San Diego Pride hadn’t yet reserved Balboa Park for the festival,” Whitburn told San Diego LGBT Weekly. “So at the very least, the reservation ensured the community celebration could be held there again.”
Having applied for the park permit in the new Pride group’s name weeks later than he would have done so had he still been leading the old group, Whitburn also said, “It’s a good thing no one had already reserved the space for a birthday party or some other event.”
Whitburn added that the city’s policy for reserving space in Balboa Park is first-come, first-served.
Last month, Save S.D. Pride, an adjunct of San Diego Community Pride, such as it is, moved closer to realizing a bona fide alternative pride organization to compete with the existing one by winning an overwhelming vote of no-confidence in the old organization’s current board of directors.
Yet Stephen Whitburn’s move beating the old Pride board to the punch by applying to reserve space at Balboa Park was perhaps the new group’s strongest leverage. It was at least as persuasive, if not more so than its success in producing legions of LGBT and allied community members who consistently showed up in person to meetings and cast votes in support of usurping the long-established organization.
The uprising against San Diego LGBT Pride, which just this week rendered substantial concessions to the new group, could reasonably be characterized as a hyperlocal microcosm of the national and global antiestablishment uprisings that have swept old orders aside during the past 15 months, the upset victory of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton not least among them.
That said, it now appears that the ultimate San Diego LGBT community “old-order” insider, City Commissioner Nicole Murray Ramirez, who writes a column for this publication, is now satisfied that the establishment has sufficiently responded to the demands of Save S.D. Pride. Not least among those demands is the reinstatement of a Community Advisory Council, whose mandate is to ensure greater diversity and community input, as well as greater board accountability at Pride.
“The community concern was that the Pride Board was not listening to the community and did not have a good relationship with the community it was meant to serve,” Murray-Ramirez told San Diego LGBT Weekly. “Now they have responded to the community’s requests and concerns and I believe they are going in the right direction.”
One area where the Pride board continues to be noticeably silent is on its firing of former executive director, Stephen Whitburn. Murray Ramirez says an apology for that action is past due and should be forthcoming.
Regardless, Whitburn is optimistic about his future and says he remains bright-eyed about LGBTQ pride as a concept and both San Diego LGBT Pride organizations, whichever endures in the end.
“San Diego Pride will produce the festival as usual next year,” Whitburn said. “I hired a great staff that is still there, and they’ll do a great job as always. I’m looking forward to wherever my career takes me next.”
As far as park and special events permits, at this point it could be the courts, the court of public opinion, or maybe even the San Diego City Attorney’s Office that decides who gets to hold the 2017 San Diego LGBT pride festival.
